The explosive progress of the newest wave of fashionable meme cash has exerted strain on Ethereum, driving fuel charges even larger.
As demand for buying and selling the PEPE meme cryptocurrency continues to skyrocket, Ethereum’s fuel charges have surpassed their one-year excessive. On Might 4, the typical value of a single Ethereum transaction surpassed $15.82.
Although the typical Ethereum transaction charge has risen to between $50 and $70 in 2021, nothing a lot has occurred because the market crashed in Might 2022.
It’s attainable that the rise in fuel charges is because of the reputation of meme cash, particularly the lately launched PEPE. Within the final 24 hours, extra PEPE was traded on Uniswap than Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) or USDT stablecoin. Which means extra PEPE was traded than WBTC or USDT.
On Might 1, PEPE entered the highest 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, reaching a valuation of over $500 million. Since then, the token’s worth has continued to rise, most lately reaching $879 million.
Following the triumph of PEPE coin, quite a few imitators representing varied web memes have emerged.
Uniswap buying and selling swimming pools for meme cash resembling SPONGE, TURBO, BOB, and TRBNR are presently essentially the most energetic good contracts on Ethereum, in keeping with knowledge from crypto analytics agency Nansen.

As a result of larger fuel charges, 9,392 ETH have been burned within the final 24 hours, which is identical as the best quantity within the final yr. In 2021, Ethereum did a tough fork, which meant that part of all transactions have been misplaced. So, because the variety of transactions on the community goes up, extra ETH is destroyed.
Are scaling options for Ethereum helpful?
The mainnet charges have gone up, and so have the fuel charges for layer-2 transactions. It’s because details about layer-2 transactions can be put in layer-1 blocks for safety.
Layer-2 scaling strategies could be both zero-knowledge proofs or optimistic. Each use a distinct know-how referred to as rollups, which teams transactions that occur off of the mainnet right into a single, smaller transaction earlier than closing on the mainnet.
On this planet of blockchain know-how, it has been noticed that optimistic rollups have fared higher than zero-knowledge proof (ZK)-based rollups, significantly when it comes to influence throughout a sure occasion. Charges for token swaps on ZK-based scaling options resembling Polygon zkEVM, Starknet, and zkSync Period mainnet have skilled a major surge, starting from $2 to $11.
A member of the zkSync Discord group revealed that they needed to pay $11 to transform ETH to USDC, expressing shock that “Is it gonna cost that much?” One other consumer complained about zkSync’s $30 charge for DeFi deposits.
L2 Charges knowledge exhibits that the fuel charges for sending ETH on Arbitrum One and Optimism, that are each Optimistic rollup choices, are between $0.2 and $0.6 for swap tokens. That is about ten instances larger than the typical worth.
Content material Supply: decrypt.com